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ROCK REVIEW; From Blake and Wagner to the Teletubbies

The guitarist Gary Lucas gave a 10th-anniversary concert at the Knitting Factory on Friday night, summing up a higgledy-piggledy performing career that all started with a one-man show at the Knitting Factory's old space on East Houston Street. The marathon retrospective took four hours to go from solo guitar fantasias to jokey, low-impact duets to a highly organized rock trio, and there was something extremely collegial -- maybe even domestic -- about the whole thing. The evening felt like a long visit to Mr. Lucas's apartment, while he stood on a chair and reviewed his accomplishments.

That's partly because Friday night's audience was a small gathering of friends and followers. (Mr. Lucas has a greater constituency in Europe, where he is more widely known and appreciated as one of the better sidemen in Captain Beefheart's early-80's band, and for his perfect embodiment of the downtown New York, genre-hopping musical mindset.) But the show also felt small because Mr. Lucas doesn't have a guitar god's requisite sense of self-confidence; rather than spawning proteges by wrapping his technique in accessible packages, his music aims for a rarefied, literary crowd.

His songs needed a bit of critical apparatus in order for the audience to be in on the references, and Mr. Lucas provided it with nudges and winks, whether he was detailing the provenance of his National steel guitar, explaining the significance of songs like ''Breath of Bones'' (something to do with a novel version of the film ''The Golem'') and ''Poison Tree'' (a William Blake image), or defending his decision to render the theme from ''Teletubbies.'' (''It's my favorite TV show -- currently the finest effervescence of English culture,'' he said, smirking, and typically ambiguous about whether he meant it.)

The solo-guitar section of his set went two ways: pyrotechnic overkill with an electric guitar and a digital-delay machine, and intelligent vindications of the unified-field approach to music. He played Wagner's ''Ride of the Valkyries'' and ''Tannhauser'' Overture, fingering with rapid accuracy and raising storm clouds of distortion to no particular end; but he also played a beautiful Chinese song from the 1930's on his steel guitar, making it sound like a back-country blues.

Of a string of duets, with the singers Danielle Gerber and Richard Barone and the multi-instrumentalist Peter Stampfel, the best were those with Mr. Stampfel, who, like Mr. Lucas, has the air of a song collector gone mad. As the Du-Tels, they have performed quite a few times before, and their performances of ''God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen'' (with all its verses) and Johnny Cash's ''Ring of Fire'' were charmingly loose and deviant.

The debut of Mr. Lucas's new band, whose concept is to play children's songs with Jewish themes, was a lukewarm experience; with two nonsingers, a jazz bass player, a drummer, and John Zorn bleating squeals on an alto saxophone, it had fun with spooky songs about the Sandman and ''the Mensch in the Moon,'' but too often devolved into blunt slapstick.

Finally Mr. Lucas gave a reprise of his long-running band Gods and Monsters, a band that never had a fixed personnel but has served to showcase all of his directions at once -- film and television music, psychedelia, Delta-blues fingerpicking and rock-guitar interpretations of classical music scores. This was the part of the show worth waiting for; with a practiced band (Jonathan Kane on drums and Ernie Brooks on bass), Mr. Lucas could connect his considerable talents to something greater than his own intellect. And something happened: the band rocked, needing no explanatory footnotes.